person Ojo Taiye, two poems

Ojo Taiye is a young Nigerian who uses poetry as a handy tool to hide his frustration with the society. His poems and works have appeared in journals like Rattle, Frontier Poetry, Palette, Stinging fly, Notre Dame Review, Vallum, Crannog, Argot, Brittle Paper, Glass Journal, Elsewhere, Eunoia Review, Lit Mag, Juke, Praxis Magazine and elsewhere.

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grief as a collection of olives & smoke

what are your favorite flowers? are they blooming? there is a
sadness so heavy it’s not by sad boys
or for sad boys please let me die alone i walk outside & living
(this is home) & somewhere
there is a book i want to write called repercussive silence can we
pretend the memories don’t manifest themselves in every object passed?
is your time linear? do the dead have purpose for the living?
i can barely remember your face & your hum (the lovely songs of
extinct birds) stumble into me
again & again like a child discovering the word BEREAVEMENT
i am tired of writing such a
useless fucking poem- (she’s not coming back)
say i’m
the cassette tape whose hair
unwound underwater you swim through

a dove falls from the sky
i name it mother & the fifty bodies marching
through my chest–
a mudslide

(a funeral plot open– cages or tombstones or the hands from a father)

the first time i died is when
i saw my mother crying once– a squeezed cloud
across a border that’s not
a stitch but a wound

where nations part

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SILENT NIGHT & BEYOND

the first hour in a life
without clocks: name
whatever falls from
the sky as you

you are the song
in a dead language
a broken coast—

after every word
after every ruin
after every shard
of misplaced stars

you didn’t exactly mean
to survive this— tulips severed
spill open like an offering
beyond the marrow of distance

you’ve spent 45 seconds
of your life falling out of
fourth-story buildings
furious at your pulse

you are a city made of rain
with silent doors & locks—
a mouth full of iron & a throat
stuck with stone, swan & sycamore

you waited patiently until you
forgot to breathe—
a plume of ash in orange-
bottled dreams